As I utter the words, I feel something unlatch in my mind, not an answer, just a flash of warning to pay attention to what I’m saying. Coffins. Or maybe not coffins. And not therpenal. Thiopental. Black text on a white background. I’ve seen it before.
I ask Greg if I can borrow his phone. He pushes it across the table. I take Hendricks’s card from my purse and call him.
“Maggie,” Hendricks says. “Where are you?”
I tell him.
“Good. Stay with him. I’m almost to your apartment.”
“In the medical examiner’s report,” I ask, “was one of the drugs sodium thiopental?” I know I’ve seen this name, and I’ve seen it at the Rocque.
Greg’s hand slides from his eyes.
“He told you about the medical examiner’s report?” says Hendricks.
I turn away from Greg. “The names of the tranquilizers,” I say. “Do you know what they were?”
“Who are you talking to?” Greg says, grabbing for my arm. Sweat and tears have soaked his forehead and temples.
“What else did Shaw tell you?” Hendricks’s voice demands.
I leap up from the table, out of reach. “I’ve seen sodium thiopental on something. I can picture it in my mind, like I copyedited it.”
“That’s just one of many possibilities. The full report won’t be back for weeks,” Hendricks says. “But just stay put, okay?”
Greg’s voice is rising, but I can’t focus on him. As I end the call, I’m still seeing the words. Sodium thiopental. The second word doesn’t look correctly spelled, so my mind stutters over it every time.
“I don’t understand you,” Greg is saying. “This horrible thing happens to me and you’re the first person I try to see, and you call somebody else to talk about brands of tranquilizers? Do my feelings not even matter to you?”
“I’m really sorry,” I say, and hand the phone back to Greg. “But I have to go.”
Although the words don’t sound like mine, although part of me cannot believe how cold I’m being, I leave him and walk down Broadway, into the rising heat.
“Go where?” he shouts after me.
I walk faster. Greg doesn’t follow, but I don’t feel like I’ve really left him until I turn a corner and pass a whole block of grimy buildings, with their ancient arches and crates of cheap plastic sunglasses, pi?atas, hats, and socks. Even then I can still feel the print of this morning’s embrace on my sweat-stained shirt, and the kiss Greg left in my hair. Inside the shell of my body, however, the rest of me is finally retreating, condensing into a hard core, untouchable. I feel sad for myself, and for Greg, that I held on to the dream of us so long. Maybe if he had felt freer, he wouldn’t have gotten so upset over Kim’s flight from him. Maybe she would have gone home to him last Tuesday instead of vanishing forever.
A child’s laugh tumbles from an upstairs window. I hear a radio tuned to country music.
Sodium thiopental. It hovers big and dark, on an empty field, like a title. A caption.
Find the who. Who gets hurt. Who gains. Whose life will never be the same.
As I turn back to Bunker Hill and climb the stairs to the Rocque, a curtain rises in my mind. The shadows of characters start to gather. The characters are vivid and real, but they’re far away; I don’t hear their words. All I see is silhouettes moving across a stage, talking, fighting, and embracing in silence. There are two of them. Then four. Then five. The actors have grotesque proportions: hulking shoulders, hands like talons, serpentine necks, as if their human natures are slowly being exchanged with savage animals, and they are battling this, too. In fact, they are battling their own savagery more than each other.
My thighs ache with the ascent. Sweat starts trickling down my forehead and spine. Ten steps from the top, I stop and look back down at Grand Central Market, the dusty table where I sat with Greg. He’s gone. It’s occupied now by another couple, young and brown, sitting so close they would barely have to lean to kiss.
I have trampled on a grieving man’s heart, my best friend hates me, I may lose my job, my apartment is unsafe, a killer may be stalking me. And what am I doing? I am standing still again, frozen, and looking back.
I scan the sidewalk for Greg anyway, and the market entrance, peering into the gloom of food stalls where I wandered, aimless, the day after Brent Patrick put us all to death in Executed. But Greg has really vanished this time, and I have the feeling I will never search a crowd for him again. An old blue Mercedes glides across my vision, low as a boat, anonymous, hinting of days of forgotten glamour. I surge up the last steps to the plaza, into its brightness and fountains, suddenly thirsty again, wishing I had kept my cup. And then I remember where I saw the words sodium thiopental.
Jason Rains worked hard to obtain real execution drugs for Executed. A compounding pharmacy provided him sodium thiopental on the condition that, when the exhibition was over, the museum registrar would dispose of it at a hazardous waste site.
Who would ever know if Evie kept the syringes instead? Everyone trusted her to do her job.
Four players: Greg, Kim, Brent, Barbara. Enter Evie. A fifth figure set in motion by the other four. One possessive, one secretive, one aggressive, one utterly vulnerable. And one driven by her obsession to the threshold of murder.
Evie monitored the comings and goings of the art crates, too. Rothkos and Pollocks to the airport. Permanent-collection works to offsite storage. All of them in the same big pine boxes, stuck with labels. Who would ever guess if she shipped something else—a human being—inside? Everyone trusted her to do her job.
Everyone trusted Evie. Diligent, private, always-working-late Evie, down in her basement office. Theater-buff Evie, who was dazzled by Brent’s genius. They all were dazzled by him downstairs. But Evie, who idealized fame and competed for everything, would want to be the one who got Brent. Secretly or openly. Nothing would mean more to her than possessing a star. Until Kim Lord came along and threatened to steal him away.
The last time I saw Kim Lord, she was hurrying down the street, and she jumped like something bit her, and then she kept running. The image stuck in my mind because Kim Lord wasn’t the jumpy type. The image stuck in my mind because the woman hurrying wasn’t Kim Lord.
But everyone, including me, trusted that she was.
25
Before I round the corner to the loading dock, I stop to catch my breath. Against a spray-painted concrete wall, I smooth my rumpled skirt and pull my damp hair back from my neck. I run my tongue over my fuzzy teeth and spit. By night, a few people crawl down to this underpass to sleep, but by day the asphalt is empty except for guardrails, dumpsters, and the steady rumble of traffic overhead. It’s hard to believe that the Gala happened here only a week ago, but it did, flooding this grime with its lights and diamonds and spotless tablecloths. That night was a beginning for the rest of us, but for Kim—for Evie—it was an ending.
Once at the lake near my childhood home, I cut my foot badly on a beach shell. I’ve forgotten the pain, but I remember the feeling of the shell slicing into my foot. That awful, eerie feeling of my skin being entered and opened—it’s stuck with me all these years. The truth—or what I think is the truth—feels like that now. A gash. Impossible to believe.
Memories whir through my mind. I see Evie in her first weeks at the museum, shrugging when I asked where she was from.
“All over California. My mom moved us around a lot, depending on the guy.” And then later, telling me about her stepfather Al, declaring his love to her. “He was sure I would run away with him.” But Evie didn’t. She ran away alone. Something about that story always seemed off to me: the way Evie cast herself as both the victim and the romantic lead.